3 out of 5

Okay.  What I like about the time-traveling Future Proof is that it puts a sensible limitation on it: that we can only travel back into the past.  So our two leads – understand they’re on a one way mission, keep jumping earlier and earlier, directed to accomplish a ‘mission’ – which seems to put history on the path that we know it – by an attachment one wears called a ‘Sing,’ short for singularity.  And further to Phillipson and Murillo’s credit, the detailing of how this technology comes about is a nice splinter off of typical time-travel lore.  Even though its over-expositioned to us on a full two-page spread of text, the story’s pieces have an understandable and simple design that nonetheless ends up showing a complicated picture.  The art and computer colors are a bit stiff, with some jumbled panels similarly showing the indie nature of the book, but the style is also consistent, which makes it easy to get in to for each issue – meaning the creators know what they’re capable of showing with their art, and the pages generally stick to it.  Unfortunately, it never feels like we get an idea of what the focus of ‘Future Proof’ is going to be.  On the one hand, it feels like it’s just going to be a tour of how these two travelers have changed history, but then we get flashes of the background of the program that put them on their way, suggesting there’s an intended extra layer to events that we never quite get to focus on because of that issue’s shenanigans.  The tone also shifts dramatically from drama to comedy, further making it difficult to say what, exactly, the book is.

So FP has the loose and open structure common to creator-owned books that can produce some wonderfully out-there things…  And the book, surprisingly, has some new angles to offer on a well-trod sci-fi theme.  But if by three issues in, I’m still uncertain where things are going, I can’t say that I was at any point all-in on the story.